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Everyman. His pilgrimage towards salvation is chronicled by Dostoyevsky in terms of the biblical myth of original sin – he has fallen from grace, and must regain it. In his own knowledge of the sacredness of his own person, and of the violation of that sacredness inherent in his crime, he bears within him the seeds of a new life which grows out of the conflict of ‘for’ and ‘against’. The entire ‘detective story’ form of the novel is intended to simulate the circumstances of an inquisition. Porfiry Petrovich, Zamyotov and the rest of the police apparatus are concerned in the first instance to probe Raskolnikov's soul and to make him aware that the crime he has committed is a sin against the divine presence within himself. Raskolnikov feels little remorse for having killed the old woman, but suffers under a crushing, life-destroying weight of misery at what he has ‘done to himself’, to use Sonya's words.
    One aspect of Raskolnikov's revolt against God that has sometimes been neglected by critics is to be seen in his name: the Raskol , or ‘Schism’, is the term used to describe the split that took place in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid seventeenth century, when certain liturgical reforms were introduced by Patriarch Nikon. The raskol ' niki were sectarians who clung to the old rituals, putting themselves at variance with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, with whom they came into violent and sometimes bloody conflict. Dostoyevsky had met these ‘Old Believers’ and their descendants in the labour camp at Omsk, and wrote about them in The House of the Dead . In an essay on the Schism, V. S. Solovyov characterized it as a form of ‘Russian Protestantism’, a disease of true Christianity, diagnosing its central error as a tendency to confuse the human with the divine, the temporal with the eternal, the particular with the universal; denying the supremacy of Christianity's collective principle and reality, the Church, it tended towards a divinization of the individual:
    Containing within it a germ of Protestantism, the Russian Schism cultivated it to its limits. Even among the Old Believers, the true preserver of the ancient heritage and tradition is the individual person.This person does not live in the past, but in the present; the adopted tradition, here shorn of an advantage over the individual in terms of living wholeness or catholicity (as in the Universal Church) and being in itself no more than a dead formality, is revitalized and reanimated merely by the faith and devoutness of its true preserver – the individual person. No sooner, however, does a position of this kind start to be aware that the centre of gravity is shifting from the dead past to the living present, than the conventional objects of tradition lose all value, and all significance is transferred to the independent, individual bearer of that tradition; from this there proceeds the direct transition to those free sects which notoriously claim personal inspiration and personal righteousness as the basis of religion.
    In Crime and Punishment there are clear indications that Dostoyevsky intends the reader to associate Raskolnikov with the religious heresy of staroobryadchestvo (‘Old Ritualism’), not in any specific sense but rather in a general one. In Chapter II of Part Six the investigator Porfiry Petrovich tells Raskolnikov that Mikolka, who has ‘confessed’ to the crime, comes from a family in which there are ‘Runners’ – sectarians who travelled around the country begging, and in search of any chance to humble themselves:
    ‘And did you know that he's a Raskolnik – or rather, not so much a Raskolnik as simply a sectarian; there were “Runners” in his family, and it's not so long ago since he himself spent two whole years in the country under the spiritual guidance of some elder or other… Have you any conception, Rodion Romanovich, of what the word “suffering” means to some of them? They don't do